I'm thinking mostly of teaching theory via textbook, website, etc. -- but even one on one with a good teacher, very few of them actually manage to make it interesting.
Just conveying the material clearly is important. Finding a way for the student to grasp the material while using it, while actually achieving something useful with it, is far more difficult.
I studied Suzuki method when I was little; I still remember playing the tune of Twinkle Twinkle to "see you later alligator", but we never touched on music theory beyond the very basics needed to read music notation (and not even much of that). We pretty much memorized everything we played AFAICR.
I do agree that it's essential to involve actual music in the instruction, but it needs to go beyond "a 5-tuplet looks like this; here's what it sounds like" -- that's still little more than a dreary list of definitions to memorize.
The trick is to engage the student in the music such that they need a name for this next concept so they can talk about it (which is what theory is for, really).
Just conveying the material clearly is important. Finding a way for the student to grasp the material while using it, while actually achieving something useful with it, is far more difficult.
I studied Suzuki method when I was little; I still remember playing the tune of Twinkle Twinkle to "see you later alligator", but we never touched on music theory beyond the very basics needed to read music notation (and not even much of that). We pretty much memorized everything we played AFAICR.
I do agree that it's essential to involve actual music in the instruction, but it needs to go beyond "a 5-tuplet looks like this; here's what it sounds like" -- that's still little more than a dreary list of definitions to memorize.
The trick is to engage the student in the music such that they need a name for this next concept so they can talk about it (which is what theory is for, really).